Do 3rd party ROMs also get access to the closed-source Qualcomm updates?

I have one question for the Fairphone devs after I watched the video below.

/e/OS sounds great. But usually it’s a bad idea to ditch your vendor’s Android ROM. Because the vendor ROM also gets security updates related to e.g. the Qualcomm SoC. Which often cannot be redistributed due to licensing or simply because they’re closed-source blobs in the vendor’s ROM.

Does the collaboration between Fairphone and /e/OS mean that you get the same treatment for these closed-source updates from e.g. Qualcomm?

Welcome to the forum, but to clarify this is not the support base for Fairphone but just a user forum.

Someone though may well be able to confirm.

and of course for queries about /e/ you could ask them, but again I’m sure someone here will provide some more constructive info :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Referring to your introduction, you pose queries such as

Fairphone hasn’t provided monthly updates, so you may miss that

There are a number of camera software options, often mentioned here are Open Camera and versions of Gcam.

Check out

1 Like

Can’t speak for /e/, but I’m quite sure LOS includes the firmware updates by pulling the blobs from the FPOS updates.
See a few references to LOS dev below:

2 Likes

since /e/ 0.18 the blobby qcom blob partitions are included too

3 Likes

Do you also know of a source that states this?

1 Like

just comparing the images (payload_dumper), partition contents, shasums

Some users being on /e/ had voice calling difficulties, while the OS version seemingly was the same, but modem/dsp…-partitions can differ depending on when they last flashed stock rom. So the resoution was to include the other device partitions into the /e/ ROM too.

dk1978 does this for LineageOS 0.17/0.18 since spring 2020, as he wrote in the main threads for those versions in this forum, /e/ just was late to include it and realize the problems if you don’t distribute them. The partnership with fairphone should have it covered, but my impression is qualcomm is friendly to the firmware blobs being public as wifi chipset blobs are on github for a long time by qualcomm devs. This is how linux distributions get their fix for the Atheros line.

Edit: this is a source without looking at images 🐛 FP3/Q no in call audio after update to 0.18-q (#3670) · Issues · e / Backlog · GitLab

And for those who asked, we are bundling the firmware via OTA.

3 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.